Interpretation is invention

Music, which has been composed to be performed by professional musicians, must be notated in a complex system of figures. The figures must be decoded and transformed into sounds of music. This process of transformation is necessarily a process of invention. It is not a search for an ultimate truth, possibily contained in the codes of the score or a tracking for any intentions of the deceased composer.

There my be stylistic rules for musical interpretation, which has been researched by musicology. We know, in parts, how historical music has been performed in the old times. And there may be lots of further issues for a research concerning historical performance practices. Nevertheless, we can't find the hertitage of historical music and its message for todays recipients in any suggested will or style of contemporaries of a music, which has been faded away ages ago.

A historical score of music is not a painting which must be restores by specialists. A historical score has been composed to give a chance to generations of musicians to reinvent concepts of music with the support of fabulous ideas by someone who once notated his musical ideas. But this someone was wise enough to know that the notation of musical signs would always need interpretation and creative transformation during a performing process. Musical notation never wanted just one possible sounding result nor any best result. Musical notation as a graphic system has been created to build well-defined outlines for the memory. These outlines do need not only translation or restauration but creative reinvention. Invention during the act of a musical performance means to build a shape of music and sounds, new and unpredictable for the very moment of real time.
If interpreters of composed historical music do not take the risk to rebuild their phrases and melodies as if they would be invented right now, they will tend to churn out dreary sounds, just reanimated pictures of a musical past
which is supposed to be exciting and precious. But this could be a big error. Music is only alive, if it is invented at the moment when it is performed.